The Turpin Family: Inside California’s House of Horrors

In January 2018, the world was horrified by the shocking rescue of 13 children from their parents’ so-called “house of horrors” in Perris, California. The Turpin family story became one of the most disturbing child abuse cases in modern American history. For years, David and Louise Turpin kept their children — ranging in age from 2 to 29 — chained, starved, beaten, and isolated from the outside world inside their modest suburban home. The children were denied medical care, education, and even the basic right to wash themselves.

When 17-year-old Jordan Turpin bravely escaped through a window and called 911 with a deactivated phone, she set in motion a rescue operation that stunned the nation. Police discovered children so emaciated they looked half their age, shackled to filthy beds in squalid rooms. The Turpin parents had maintained a carefully constructed facade of a large, happy homeschooling family, even registering their house as a private school called “Sandcastle Day School” to avoid suspicion.

The Turpin parents, both originally from West Virginia, carried a dark history of strict religious beliefs mixed with total psychological control. Their twisted discipline methods and obsession with power left their children traumatised, unable to speak in full sentences, and terrified of the outside world. After their arrest, David and Louise Turpin were sentenced to life in prison, while their children began the long road to recovery. But even after their freedom, the Turpin siblings faced further challenges from the child welfare system meant to protect them, revealing heartbreaking gaps in America’s social safety net.

Crime at Bedtime takes you deep into this haunting true crime story, examining the hidden lives of the Turpin children, the shocking details of their imprisonment, the bravery of a teenage girl who saved her family, and the failures of the system to support them even after rescue. This is more than a tale of unimaginable cruelty — it is a story of survival, courage, and the will to rebuild a life from the ashes of abuse.

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